I’ve started using a “universal translator” plugin for wordpress across most of my sites lately. In the past I’ve seen many people using google or bablefish translation to view pages (according to the logs.) I thought it would be a great convenience and perhaps open up my posts to be searched by viewers who read other languages. I’ve studied Spanish for quite some time and previously have studied German and French. Since, the universal translator plugin is based on google’s translation engine I know it’s not going to be perfect. But, I did a bit of proofreading in the languages I could and from what I could see it was more or less intelligible (obviously there were some problems, but I’ve seen (MUCH) worse translations of Japanese news-stories to English..)

Anyway, the nature of the plugin is that it’s not possible to manage the translations (they’re dynamically pulled from your pick of several translation services.) I have had relatively NASTY feedback from one reader that the Danish version of the page was jibberish (gibberish?) and there should be a link to the original as it MIGHT make sense. Well, for those that are interested there are links on each page to the original as well as the various translations. Just look for the various flags in the sidebar. (I know a flag does not equal a language, but that is the way a good many sites do it and it makes sense to most everyone.) This, and my other sites are originally written in English. I would love to manually translate everything into other languages, but at present the time/expense of that is prohibitive so for the present time, machine translation is the only way we’ll have multi-language content here.

(The Spanish language translation alone could take me several years to complete the way my current schedule is….)

I hope viewers will appreciate at least the attempt to make this site more accessible.

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